Joker is a faixa preta (black belt) in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and a black belt in Jeet Kune Do with Team McVicker. He is a yellow-white arm band in Dragonleg Muay Thai. He is the chief instructor of Goshin Jitsu, an eclectic martial arts club and has black belts in two different styles of karate. He's fought muay thai, sport jiu-jitsu, and mixed-martial arts.

Search This Blog

10.12.2006

Having again spent most of the week working nights, eating "dinner", sleeping, eating "breakfast" and then doing the whole thing again I had the need to do something, anything to keep my technical skills and conditioning from deteriorating further. However, I didn't have a lot of time so the masochistic perfectionist in me said, why bother working out if I couldn't do it for 1 1/2 to 2 hours, but the realist won the battle, I figured a 25-30 minute workout was better than nothing. When your scheduled is cramped you might as well take advantage of what you got.I'm a big proponent of bag work and shadowboxing, it's excellent solo training and no great fighter is complete without it. However its hard to do well, anyone can swat at a bag a few times or do the fighting equivalent of an air guitar for 20-30 seconds, few people can do the round after round needed to polish their fighting craftmanship.Hence the latest in solo training technology: ICE or incremental combination exercise (sorry back to the silly acronyms). Basically you build a combination, e.g.:

An offensive striking combination

Jab

Jab-cross

Jab-cross-lead hook

Jab-cross-lead hook-cross

Jab-cross-lead hook-cross-lead uppercut

Jab-cross-lead hook-cross-lead uppercut-overhand

Or breaking down the four count kicking combination and going through them in series, for example #3:

In this way you do non-monotonic repetitions and you have to keep thinking about which set you are on. At the same time you can start to feel how each move functions independently, that is, assess its technical perfection but on the subsequent repetitions see how it flows or assess its applicability.A separate note: it's getting kind of chilly in my garage so I wore my wrestling shoes. This forces one to kick with the lower shin, hitting with the top of the foot cause the shoe to create painful pressure on the ankle, who knew that wrestling could contribute to proper kicking mechanics.